“If I depart from thee I cannot live;
And in thy sight to die, what were it else
But like a pleasant slumber in thy lap?”
After all, Lavinia is not unrecognizable. Scarcely has she left Mrs.
Prince, whose brow is still creased by the thought of an imminent
son-in-law, when one and another claim greetings from her, and in half
an hour she has shaken hands with three parts of the gathering; has been
presented to the strange clergy--St. Gengulpha’s has a new vicar since
last year--and been cordially pressed by Christopher to feel the biceps
of one of the East End curate’s arms, which has shown its merits in the
just-ended tug-of-war.
In the eyes of all them to whom she was already known, has been welcome,
a little hesitating surprise, and a not unkindly curiosity. They know
that she has passed through deep waters since last in her bloom and
bonniness they had looked upon her, though they little guess the awful
Dead Sea bitterness of taste of the waters that have gone over her. Is
she recovered enough to be treated like any one else? Will it be better
to allude to her long absence, rejoicing in its having ended; or to
take her reappearance for granted? Some answer the question in one way
and some in the other, as tact or insight diversely guides them; and she
responds quietly to all, with a gravely grateful look from under the
frills of her white muslin hat, and that overpowering sense that the
acquaintances that accost her are no more real than she herself. But she
is not unrecognizable! Through the haze that enwraps her sensations
pierces a throb of joyful reassurance, proportioned to the apprehension
that had forerun it--an apprehension not formulated to herself, that if
she has so changed as to be unknowable by persons, many of whom have
been acquainted with her from childhood, she may, in the dim and distant
possibility of their ever meeting again, be passed unrecognized by one
whose whole knowledge of her had only covered six weeks.
She has come back from the grave! Is it any wonder that at first she
walks in a maze--as one suddenly awakened from a century of sleep,
doubtfully re-entering the kingdom of life? Glad voices are in the air
around her; glad movement on the pleasant earth about her; a misty
gladness, dim and vast, somewhere deep, deep down in her own being; and
through it all a bewildering misgiving that this feast of life cannot be
spread for _her_; that she does but dream, and will presently awake to
the black gown, and the manuscript on the bureau, and the long treadmill
of remorse and expiation.
She is roused from her trembling fantasies by the reality of Mrs.
Darcy’s slender arm commandingly hooked into hers, and whirling her
away to plaister a barked shin and stem a bleeding nose. But it is only
as long as the need for her cobwebs and cold keys lasts that she can
keep a hold upon the solid commonplaces of existence. Even while “God
save the Queen” is melodiously ringing across the evening meads, even
while the gratefully vociferous boys are making their sweet voices
hoarse with prolonged cheering from the vehicles packed for their
return, she falls back into the uncertain domain of the dream.
In the bustle of subsidiary adieux that follow those of the choir, in
reciprocal congratulations upon success and thanks for help, Lavinia
steals away unnoticed. She gives no directions to her feet whither to
carry her, but, though otherwise will-less in the matter, they know that
she shrinks from at once regaining the mournful emptiness of the house
on the hill. Anywhere else--anything but that! It is all one to her!
Only a step to the hop-garden at the foot of Campion Place, only a rough
cart-track running between the old red-brick wall of the latter and the
green battalions of the hop-poles, now clothed with twining verdure from
top to bottom. She strolls, still in a dream, along a green aisle,
looking down a vista of apparently unending length, the bines, that have
been tied round the poles to prevent their straggling, waving defiant
strong tendrils over her head to stretch out and embrace the opposite
rank, and make pointed arches of Early English in the green cathedral.
Showers of pallid green blooms hang above her, so light and fairy-like
in their airy droop, that it seems blasphemy to connect them as
necessary concomitants with that contemptible creature--small beer!
Parallel aisle upon aisle of riotous verdure, making one gigantic green
fane!
At the end of the lofty silence beneath which she is passing burns an
altar fire of evening sunshine; and towards it her feet, still without
any conscious direction on her part, slowly carry her. But when the end
of the vista is reached, and its verdant glow exchanged for the evening
red of the fair pasture outside, the altar fire has moved further away,
and is blazing with ruddy promise for to-morrow behind the trees of
Rumsey Brake. Will she pursue it even thither? where for fifteen months
her steps have never trod, which has been to her a banned place
since----? Yet her feet still bear her onwards. In the sloping meadows
through which she passes, lambs on that day were butting and bounding;
there is neither butt nor bounding in the fleecy adults dully cropping
and waddling to-night. There were buttercups--millions of
buttercups--that day; to-day there are none! To-day the gate that leads
into the Brake is open; on that day it was locked. With a shiver of
retrospective passion, she recalls the roughness with which she had
rebuffed his offer of help, knowing what a conflagration even so casual
a contact must light in them both. After all, it might as well have
happened then as later! She is on the very path now that they had paced
in their burning pain--that woof of pain whose warp was stinging
pleasure.
On that day the moor-hens were leading little dainty broods out of the
sedge; to-day there is no life at all on the sunset-painted mirror of
the pool. Only that hot blaze that has turned it into the semblance of a
cup full of the rosy elixir of life! Here is where they paused to listen
to the nightingale. Intolerable nightingale! forcing them to hear things
forbidden--things that drove them away in terror of him and of each
other; drove them away in the vain hope of averting what must happen,
what _had_ to happen!
_Had_ to happen! Yes, and _did_ happen! A sort of exaltation in what she
has hitherto always shuddered from as the memory of a crime, takes
possession of her. It _was_ a sin! Under the circumstances it was a sin
and a treachery! But she has paid for it. No one can say that she has
not paid for it! and oh, if it could only happen again! The memory of
her fault and her suffering alike grow faint; while with her whole
tingling body and craving soul she feels again the grip of his arms, the
thundering beat of his heart against her breast, the scorching
insistence of his lips. She will go to the very spot where it happened;
will tryst him there in the aching realism of a memory that seems for
once to have been given the never-given privilege of saying to the dead
past, bound hand and foot in grave-clothes, “Stand forth!”
Slowly she paces--her knees trembling a little in the vividness of that
deliberate reconstruction--to the very place of their parting. A bend in
the grass over-flung path hides it from her till she is close upon it.
The intervening curve is rounded, and her goal is reached. Rooted to the
earth she stands; for hasn’t the force of her compelling passion evoked
his spirit to meet hers? Yet had ever spirit such shoulders? such a
sea-tanned face? such a blaze in such eagle eyes? It is no spirit; it is
in very truth, in gallant bodily presence, her own dear upstanding
fighting man, in the glory and vigour of his manhood, such as till now
she has never seen him.
“I can neither live nor die without you, and I have come to tell you
so!”
And the grip of his arms is no dream!
FINIS
PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES.